Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Remember Gaza

Lest we forget: Geneva Convention Article 56:

The occupying power has the duty of
ensuring and maintaining the medical and hospital establishments and services,
public health and hygiene in the occupied territory… Medical personal of all categories
shall be allowed to carry out their duties.

Article 33, adds:

The right to health, like all human
rights, imposes three types or levels of obligation on States parties: the
obligation to respect, protect and fulfill…

Noble obligations to anyone with respect for human need and
suffering. Total gibberish to Israel.
Almost like clockwork, Israel bombs into oblivion the hospitals, clinics, and
ambulances of Gaza. Rather than health and care, Alice Rothchild, American
Jewish Doctor reports of her visit to Palestine that:

Children are routinely tortured by
their interrogators… threats of sexual abuse or death; they are put into
solitary confinement, have fluorescent lights on twenty-four hours per day, are
placed in stress positions, and beaten.[1]

Yet, a kid trying to assist a friend injured in a peaceful demonstration
will be charged with assisting a terrorist. Throw a stone at an Israeli jeep
and he is accused of attempted murder. Rothchild calls it the “land of official
insanity.”[2] Today,
there are thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons suffering isolation. Many
are tortured. An average of two to three are killed by IDF or settlers every
week.

Gaza has been under Israeli control for half a century;
everything that goes in and everything that gets out. After three “Gaza wars,” 2008-9,
2012, and 2014, Gaza is a cesspool; no parks or green space, very little
drinkable water or sanitation facilities, electricity only a few hours a day
and no where to hide when attacked.

I worry about Gaza. But
I also worry about the kind of people we have become. From time to time,
especially when one of Israel bombardment campaigns against Gaza hits the news
for a short time, we might even think “how sad” after which we seem willing to
push it back under the rug with a “those terrorists.” Then it’s back to life as
usual. Where are Jewish values and American sense of liberty and justice for
all?

Israel has the full backing of the US military, and uses this power to steal territory and turn Gaza into a ghetto much like Jewish ghettos prior to and during WW II. Just because the holocaust occurred, Jews do not have the right to act like their Nazi oppressors.

Thomas L. Are

I preached for forty three years in the Presbyterian Church before retiring. If anyone would ever refer to me as a Liberation Theologian, I would be pleased. I started blogging several years ago to express my political and religious concern for justice, especially justice for the Palestinians.